How do I get started with Redpoint CDP?
Let's start with what you have purchased. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a type of software that integrates and aggregates customer data from various sources into a single, comprehensive database. The goal of a CDP is to provide a unified customer profile that can be used to enhance marketing and customer experience strategies.
How CDPs used to be built
In a typical or historical build of a CDP, you start by generating an inventory of your data sources. Once you have defined this set of sources, then you begin to design a database that will store, link, and make this data actionable through the process of extracting, transform, and loading data (ETL Processing) followed by additional calculations and aggregates that are suitable for your business.
The process of defining the set of sources/feeds and mapping them to the target database entities that will support the initiatives you expect to perform with the CDP is logical, but there is a lot of effort that goes into understanding the sources and defining a database suitable for capturing this data before you can consider what aggregations are needed to fully realize the potential of this data. After that, you need to build all of the processes to load, transform, and aggregate the identified data, and then execute business initiatives using the data. This can take much longer than anticipated and very often does.
How Redpoint reinvents the CDP
This is where the difference between Redpoint CDP and other platforms comes into play. We have defined the following to optimize the process:
Feed Layouts: Expedite the data ingestion process.
Predefined data model and associated summary tables: Allow a lot of the common activities to be supported as a product, so that you only need to customize the things that are unique to you as a customer.
Orchestration layer: Preconfigured based on the data model, allows you to take action on the data as soon as it is available in the system.
While optimizing the process of standardizing, ingesting, processing, and loading data to remove a lot of the common work, Redpoint additionally provides the flexibility for you to customize what you need to, so that you can focus on the more complex things that are unique to your company.
For instance, identity resolution will happen automatically when providing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) fields in the ingestion process. You can customize this to meet your specific needs, but it will happen automatically within the platform if you choose to accept the default behavior.
Building a CDP is a process that requires time and effort, but its value can be immense. Redpoint's collective years of experience with building CDPs has led to the development of a platform that has streamlined all aspects of building and taking action with the data in the CDP. This allows you to realize value from the platform a lot sooner than a typical ground-up solution.
In addition to the platform itself, a well-documented onboarding strategy is also a part of the product and provides you with a logical approach to expedite the process of going from purchase to data activation.
Once the unified customer profile is in place, it is critical to be able to then activate the data across channels directly from the CDP. Redpoint CDP provides a robust no-code audience selection and activation capability, allowing you to deliver the rich CDP data to your points of engagement.
Now you have a platform that supports your needs - what's next?
You have purchased a platform that will support your aspirations to provide your consumers with a better experience: how do you take advantage of it? As the name CDP suggests, the first step is "data" related: you need to get your data into the platform so that you can take advantage of its features.
As you go through this documentation, refer to the glossary of terms.
Next section: data ingestion basics
Now that we have discussed what was purchased and what is involved with implementing a CDP at a high level, we can move on to data ingestion with Redpoint CDP.